Judy Garland’s Hollywood Unravelling, Through the Eyes of Her Husband and Producer Sid Luft

Though Oscar absurdities seem to abound each year, 1955 yielded one of the all-time worst: the awarding of Best Actress to Grace Kelly, for her role in “The Country Girl,” rather than to Judy Garland, for her fierce and unsparing performance in the 1954 remake of “A Star Is Born,” as a rising performer who bursts brilliantly forth in the firmament while her husband and mentor, a star in decline, flames out. Garland’s Oscar loss wasn’t the only trouble that the movie faced, or the biggest, but it was the most symbolically significant one. It closed a chapter on Garland’s movie stardom, and ended the incipient career of her third husband, Sid Luft, the movie’s producer; only when the film was revived, three decades later, was it finally recognized as the heroic endeavor it was.

Garland’s tumultuous, adverturesome life has been documented in several copious biographies since her death, in 1969. But a new autobiography by Luft, “Judy and I” (Chicago Review Press), leaps beyond the personal specifics to project a forceful and distinctive picture of the making of “A Star Is Born” and of the larger world of entertainment in which the couple lived. In prose so brassy that it bruises the sensibilities, Luft, who died in 2005, illuminates the dark side of life in the spotlight and dispels any sentimental illusions about the glories of show business in Hollywood’s classic age. (The book was a long-gestating project, begun in 1963 and left unfinished at the time of his death, at the age of eighty-nine; its last two, brief chapters—which follow him and Garland through 1969, when she died, at the age of forty-seven—were written by Randy L. Schmidt on the basis of an extensive, previously unpublished interview with Luft, from the mid-nineties, as well as other documents, public and private.) The heart of the story—and of the relationship that Garland and Luft shared, which was as much professional as romantic—is Garland’s attempt, with Luft’s help, to restore her damaged career and her movie stardom; the production of “A Star Is Born” went far, though not far enough, to do so, and in the end played a terrible role in her decline.

Luft and Garland met briefly in 1937, on a Hollywood set—Garland, a young star, was celebrating her fifteenth birthday between takes, and Luft, who was running a car-customizing shop and generally living as a man-about-town, was visiting his girlfriend, Eleanor Powell, the movie’s star. Garland, a child vaudevillian, was at the start of her movie career, and would soon become a star with “The Wizard of Oz.” Luft, who came from Bronxville, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants who were in retail, had only recently arrived in Los Angeles. An athlete, a suave dancer, a sharp dresser, a short-tempered brawler with a quick response to perceived insults or slights (including anti-Semitic ones), Luft was an easy schmoozer and fast-talker and deal-maker who, around age twenty, turned a gig as a stunt diver into an entrée into the gossip columns and some experience as a producer. Luft saw quickly, in the nineteen-thirties, that Hollywood was the place for him, but he had substantial ambitions of other sorts as well. He learned to fly, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, and then, back in Los Angeles during the Second World War, earned a living as a test pilot. (He seems to have spent most of his youth fighting, flying, and fucking, not necessarily in that order.)

While there, Luft slipped easily into Hollywood society and made friends among movie-world big shots. He had a bad accident in 1943 (a plane he was testing caught fire and he crash-landed) and, soon thereafter, stopped flying and found his way into the movie business. (He also became a partner in a stable of race horses.) He worked first as an agent, then decided that he’d rather produce movies, and had several successful low-budget productions. He and Garland met again at a New York night club in 1950, introduced by a mutual friend. Luft, whose first marriage, to the actress Lynn Bari, was coming apart, sensed the instant chemistry between them, but thought the notion of a romance absurd—but Garland pursued him.

Garland was experiencing dark times. She was emotionally unstable, and her instability could be traced to her dependency on amphetamines—a habit that started when she was a child star and was given pills by the studio, M-G-M, in order to keep her vivacious before the camera during the long shoot days. She, too, was unhappily married—to the director Vincente Minnelli, who had made “The Clock,” in which Garland had one of her first adult romantic lead roles and gave one of her best performances. (The couple’s daughter, Liza, was born in 1946.) Because of her volatility and unreliability—including several suicide attempts—Garland was fired from “The Barkleys of Broadway,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” and “Royal Wedding,” and was then let go by the studio. Nonetheless, her film “Summer Stock,” released in the summer of 1950, was a hit; Garland’s performance was acclaimed, but she was a movie star without a career, and Luft planned to do something about that. As the relationship progressed, Luft wondered, “What the fuck was I doing? Judy provided a kind of edge, an excitement, but she had a reputation for instability.” But he found her “entirely loving, giving, and wholesome,” and thought that, with the long and successful career she’d had, “how unstable could she be?”

Garland reflected to him on Minnelli’s inability to help her career. They were both at M-G-M, where she had temporarily harmed his career by having him removed from one of her movies, and “he lived to work.” (Minnelli was, in fact, one of Hollywood’s most original and creative directors, up to his very last film, “A Matter of Time,” from 1976.) “According to Judy, Vincente was not capable of being a protector or husband in the deepest sense. It was a conflict of interest,” Luft writes. Luft himself had no such conflict; he made Garland’s business his business and, even while pursuing his own movie project, about horse racing, he took her career in hand. After working together on a series of performances at London’s Palladium, where Garland was a big hit, the couple returned to New York and crickets; her offers were for radio guest slots. What got her going again was an idea of Luft’s, to refurbish Broadway’s Palace Theatre, “the once proud and lucrative bastion of vaudeville, now reduced to a slum,” and to produce Garland in a show there. (Luft’s account of how he got the idea is a gem of an anecdote—a mercantile inspiration with the force of a religious vision.)

While that show was in rehearsals, in 1951, Garland realized that she was pregnant; Luft firmly advised her to get an abortion (“I was as unjustified as I was insensitive”), fearing both for the show and for the publicity that would result—both he and she were still married to other people, and he knew the “strict moral code” that was publicly enforced. (He likely had in mind the destruction of Ingrid Bergman’s American career, in 1950, when she had a baby with Roberto Rossellini while still married to Peter Lindstrom.) Garland had an abortion (which was, of course, illegal at the time). She did the Palace gig and made it a historic hit, playing there for an unprecedented nineteen weeks and winning a special Tony Award for aiding in “the revival of vaudeville.” Luft writes, “It was the beginning of the cult of Garland.” At the same time, he was aware of her prescription-drug abuse and thought that it was manageable; he writes, “I wasn’t thinking of Judy as a clinically ill person, or This is an addict. I was worried something awful had happened to the delightful, brilliant woman I loved.” This was 1952. The couple’s divorces were finalized; they married in July; Garland was pregnant, and their daughter, Lorna Luft, was born in November. Garland suffered from post-partum depression; under a doctor’s care, she was medicated, but she also self-medicated, which affected both her mental and physical health.

The remake of the 1937 film “A Star Is Born” was Garland’s idea; she had acted in a radio adaptation of it, in 1942, and wanted to be in a remake even then. But, Luft writes, the studio had no interest in turning her into an adult melodramatist; her childlike image was what they were promoting. Meanwhile, rights to the original movie suddenly became available. Luft didn’t have the money to buy them but he made a deal with someone who did, the producer Eddie Alperson. It was a crucial moment in movie history—the studios had been forced, in antitrust actions, to divest themselves of their movie theatres and to work with independent producers. The great outburst of cinematic ingenuity in Hollywood in the nineteen-fifties was due in large measure to directors, both established ones and those of a new generation, enjoying an unprecedented measure of creative freedom, away from the rigid control of studio producers and moguls. Yet the old-line moguls and their studios didn’t go away, they just dealt differently, and this, too, is part of the story of “A Star Is Born.”

In addition to physical dependency on amphetamines, Garland was motivated to take stimulants as diet pills—she struggled to keep her weight down for the purpose of being “camera slim,” as did many Hollywood actresses and aspirants. Luft’s book is filled with references—by Garland herself as well as by members of the press—to her appearance and her weight. (“Judy had been determined to look like a ‘movie star’—she wanted to be camera slim. It was that old bugaboo. I reiterated there was no need to be any thinner. . . . Her excuse was the weight issue, when in fact she was dependent. . . . She confessed it was virtually impossible for her to sustain a work mode in front of the cameras without taking some kind of medication.”) Luft tried to monitor her use of medication (“I can’t be fat,” she told him) and she accused him of interfering like an “old flatfoot,” a police officer. Luft realized that, in thinking that the medication could be managed along with her career, “I was enabling—a lesser version of what M-G-M had blatantly and inhumanely jammed down her throat.”

To make “A Star Is Born,” Luft needed the backing of a studio for upfront financing, production facilities and crew, and distribution. He went with Warner Bros. and its head, Jack Warner; the director was George Cukor, one of the most emotionally discerning directors in Hollywood. The movie was a musical, filled with production numbers for Garland, and its scope would be as mighty as the ambitions that it embodied—it would run three hours. Garland wanted Frank Sinatra to play opposite her as the fading star—he was, in fact, fading professionally (though, of course, he soon bounced back), and Warner wouldn’t have him. Luft and Garland then set their sights on Cary Grant (Luft’s portrait of Grant is a comedic surprise) but ended up with James Mason, whom they greatly admired (and who is superb in the role).

But when the movie was done, premièred, and acclaimed, Warner Bros.—facing complaints from theatre owners, who hesitated to book the film because of its length, which allowed only three shows a day—cut nearly half an hour from it, including two of Garland’s songs, and Luft could do nothing about it. Luft felt that the film would be received worse as a result of the cuts. He was right, and he was all the righter when exhibitors then demanded another version that ran a mere hundred minutes. “The grosses fell by half. We went from heroes to failures. I said to Judy, ‘Jesus, baby, this picture is not going to make any money!’ We couldn’t believe what was happening.”

Then came the Oscar debacle—not that Oscars matter in the light of history, but they certainly mattered to Garland at the moment. She was in the hospital on the night of the awards, having given birth the previous morning to the couple’s second child, Joseph. “I held Judy’s hand as the TV technicians wired her up for the win.” But she didn’t win. “Cukor believed that Academy members were influenced by the cuts to the film. Its very rhythm had been disrupted.” Luft did some Academy Kremlinology and determined that “The Academy members from Metro and Paramount voted for Grace to win. She was on a loan-out to Paramount from Metro, where she was under contract.” What’s more, Luft says, “Warner had not publicized ‘Star’ in the trades, and at the time Jack was in personal conflict with the Academy.”

The rest of the couple’s story is a sad decrescendo of frustrations and recriminations. Garland’s use of pills increased; her health was at serious risk; she nearly died of liver failure. Her career as a movie star was over. There were some possibilities—including “Butterfield 8,” “The Three Faces of Eve,” “Funny Girl” (all of which earned their stars Oscars for Best Actress), and “South Pacific”—but they all fell through. Luft’s producing career ended, too: “I now had an unrealistic approach to the business. My new point of view was that film had to be creatively worthy. This was bullshit, as box office most often buys ordinary concepts.” He started an in-flight-audio business that didn’t pan out; he left the management of Garland’s career to others. There were certainly other highlights to come, especially on the concert stage—most famously, at Carnegie Hall, in 1961—but the rest of Garland’s life was a struggle with her drug dependency, with her health, with her emotional stability, with money, with success and its absence, with her public image.

Luft honors Garland lovingly—the person and the performer—throughout “Judy and I,” despite his depiction of her agonies and his unsparing self-accusation for her part in them. He recognized her intellectual powers, her vast and protean personality, her theatrical talents, her artistic imagination, her sheer human force; he laments the end of their romance and the dissolution of their marriage (they divorced in 1965), but he laments all the more the neglect and the abuse of one of the great artists of the time. Garland comes off as a product of the studio system who was both created and destroyed, made and unmade by it. With his depiction of the high life that went along with movie-making—the night clubs and parties, the international adventures and luxurious revels—it seems a miracle that any work ever got done at all.

Yet it’s exactly those revels, the high-wire and high-energy excitement of pleasure-seekers whose off-screen liberties and disinhibitions were themselves the stuff of gossip and the spark of fascination, that distinguished the art of classic Hollywood. Above all, Luft’s book is the definitive corrective to the very movies that made Garland famous, the let’s-put-on-a-show adolescent adventures in which she co-starred, as a teen-ager, with Mickey Rooney. The innocent, apple-pie-cheeked small-town kids who were ready to do or die for show biz were already, at that age, living out the riotous energies and passions that people pay to see transmuted, whether into childish antics or high drama. Garland’s agonies may have been entirely her own, but her essential conflict was built into the system—and into the enduringly great art to which it somehow gave rise.